Here’s Why Paul Manafort’s Second Trial Could Be Even Worse for Him Than His First

The following article by Alex Henderson was posted on the AlterNet.org website August 22, 2018:

He will go to trial next month in Washington, DC for additional felony charges.

Albert V. Bryan Courthouse. Credit: Zach Gibson, Getty Images

Tuesday, August 21, 2018 was a very bad day for President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was found guilty of eight felony counts in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia near Washington, DC. After deliberating for four days, a jury determined that Manafort was guilty of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to file a report of foreign bank accounts. And the 69-year-old Manafort—a veteran political consultant who also worked on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Gerald R. Ford, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole—is facing another legal battle as well: next month, he will go to trial in Washington, DC for additional felony charges. 

Manafort was facing a total of 18 felony counts in Alexandria, but Judge T.S. Ellis III declared a mistrial on ten of the charges when the jury was unable to reach an agreement on them—and prosecutors have until August 29 to decide what they will or won’t do about those mistrial charges. It remains to be seen whether or not prosecutors will pursue those ten charges further, but Manafort is facing an estimated seven to nine years in federal prison for the eight charges he was convicted of—assuming that Trump, who doesn’t believe his former campaign manager should have been charged in the first place, doesn’t pardon him just as President Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon’s Watergate-related crimes in 1974.

Manafort’s second trial is scheduled to begin on Monday, September 17 in the Washington, DC courtroom of U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee. The charges Manafort will be facing include money laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to register as a foreign agent—and while these are different charges that he faced in Alexandria, they also came about as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia-related investigation.

View the complete article here.